American International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 2 No. 6; December 2016 Transcending Nationalist and Imperialist Boundaries: Rushdie, Seth and the Politics of Emancipatory Feminist Discourse in 20th Century India Kavita Pillai PhD Candidate in English University of Missouri-Columbia United States of America Abstract Using Salman Rushdie‘s Midnight’s Children and Vikram Seth‘s A Suitable Boy, this paper argues that the restrictive rhetoric of imperialism, colonialism and nationalism worked as a subjugating force instead of an emancipating impetus that did more harm than good for the subordinate classes, in this case women. Both novels take place during India‘s independence and showcase the era‘s pre-eminent ideals of nationhood and nation-building.The paper argues that the novels follow the period‘s conversations on nationalism and highlight how the question of women‘s rights and place in the newly freed nations was a critical issue for the leaders pursuing a just democracy. I posit that this focus stemmed not from a genuine effort to promote equality of gender but from a reactionary mode of defense against critics of Indian leaders, who deemed these leaders ineffective in running a nation that would be safe for all its people, especially women and minorities. Keywords: Nationalism, Feminism, India, Women, Postcolonial, Rushdie, Seth Introduction In E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Aziz joins the revolutionary chorus of a nation when he declares, "India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one!" (289). But while Forster suggests that the colonial presence in India is intolerable, completing his novel in the aftermath of the First World War, ―he is clearly not convinced by the revolutionary promises of nationalism‖ (Teresa Heffernan 471): Fielding taunts Aziz with the remark "India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth- century sisterhood!"( Forster 289). There was a strong sense of India‘s shortcomings in becoming a democratic nation. One of the concerns was the plight of the minorities in India and that inevitably included women and their ―barbaric‖ treatment, as perceived by the West. ―[Gayatri] Spivak‘s sentence—―White men are saving brown women from brown men‖—serves to justify colonial interventions if white men are taken as saviors and brown men are scapegoated as oppressors (of brown women)‖ (Norton 2112). The British found an excuse to intervene and ‗save‘ the women in India from the oppressive Indian men. ―The ―masculine-imperialist‖ ideology can be said to produce the need for a masculine-imperialist rescue mission‖ (Rosalind C. Morris, Introduction 3). The rescue mission served as a façade for colonial presence. Focusing on widow-sacrifice (sati) in colonial India, ―the British move to abolish the practice,‖ which was justified on the basis of the British ―civilizing mission‖ in India (Ilan Kapoor 1). Sympathy for the sati manifests itself as protectionist discourse. Spivak contrasts this position with the then dominant Hindu one, which excused the practice by arguing that the widows ―wanted to die‖ (Kapoor 1). Spivak indicates how each representation legitimizes the other: one purports to be a social mission, saving Hindu women from their own men, the other a reward, allowing the women to commit a 'pure' and 'courageous' act. But all the while, the widow's own voice is ignored. ―Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears...There is no space from which [she] can speak‘ (Spivak, 1988: 306-307). This protection of women became for the British a signifier for the establishment of a good society. According to the native male, the women voluntarily wanted the practice as an ascription of a free will. Spivak notes however that neither version could represent the voice and will of the woman. This leads to an important phenomenon: 1) the disappearance of the postcolonial woman from discourses that are of pertinence to them and 2) the hijacking of their rights to free will by nationalist leaders. 20 © Center for Global Research Development www.cgrd.org Materials and Methods I am using Salman Rushdie‘s Midnight’s Children and Vikram Seth‘s A Suitable Boy to show how the restrictive rhetoric of imperialism, colonialism and nationalism work as a subjugating force instead of being an emancipating impetus, and in the end, does more harm than good for the subordinate class, i.e. women in this case. Both these novels take place during the time of India‘s independence, and showcase the ideals of nationhood and nation- building that was going on at the time. These novels‘ main plots follow the discouse on nationalism that was prevalent at the time, and how the question of women‘s rights and place in the new India was one of the issues that was the central focus for the leaders pursuing a just democracy. I argue that this movement stemmed not from a genuine effort to promote equality of gender but from a reactionary mode of defence against critiques of the ineffeciency of Indian leaders‘ to make India a safe place for all its people, especially women and minorities. Sati (the burning of a widow on the funeral pyre of her husband) was one of the biggest critiques of India, something used by the British, time and again, to show the ineffectiveness of the Indian man to be able to protect his woman. The British were the ones responsible for banning Sati and declaring it inhumane. But the effect of the abolition of Sati in the end was, that ―[g]roups rendered psychologically marginal by the exposure to Western impact…had come under pressure to demonstrate to others as well as to themselves, their ritual purity and allegiance to traditional high culture‖ (Spivak 1988: 298). Both Rushdie‘s and Seth‘s novels show how this pressure to perform, pressure to please the west put pressure on the men in India to create a certain mold for their women to fit, so as to be able to portray their own competence in matters of governance, and this in turn put a sort of twofold pressure on the women in India: to pretend to be modern and free of oppression, but at the same time, not too modern and/or western. The women were still expected to athere to the qualities of real ―Indianness,‖ moral purity and traditonal culture, but with an exhibition of liberation and modernity. The men and women in the novels are caricatures of these roles and help to confirm the hypocrisy that left women in a position of passive subservience. As a result, the nationalist discourse of postcolonialism sidelined women for the sake of nationalist agenda that favored men and left women in charge of domestic matters, with no voice in the newly formed nation- state. Hence, when nationalism became the pre-eminent cause during India‘s struggle for independence from the British, claiming Indian superiority became the tool of cultural revivalism, resulting in an essentializing model of Indian womanhood. Consequently, women‘s parity was not just a question of women‘s rights but one of the ways for the upcoming nationalist leaders to demonstrate the nation‘s aptitude in forming a just democracy. Unlike the Western feminist movement, India‘s feminist movement was initiated by men and later joined by women—men who wanted to show ―the Raj‖ that they treated their women well, and hence, by doing so, contributed to bringing about the wave of ―involuntary feminism.‖ The new woman could safely venture outside as long as she displayed the signs of modesty and femininity in her dress, religiosity and demeanor, ―which demonstrated that she had internalized the norms of the ‗new patriarchy‘, which was ‗reformed, reconstructed, fortified against charges of barbarism and irrationality‘‖ (Partha Chatterjee 1993: 127-30). Consequently, the nationalist discourse as set by men dictated women‘s liberation movements, and in order to show the western critics a ―modern‖ India free of barbaric prejudices, the nation‘s feminist movement was born. However, this idea of feminism was one that was fashioned by men, and they expected women to stage themselves as a liberated women but at the same time not let go of the religious and traditional roles that were an essential element of the ―ideal Indian‖ woman, daughter and wife. Fundamentally, the women‘s ostensible freedoms were essentially still controlled by the men who sought to show their own resourcefulness in running a nation. ―Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappear[ed], not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the 'third world woman' caught between tradition and modernization‖ (Spivak, 1988: 301). Women became the bearers of the nationalist discourse‘s honor and the face of modern India as presented by men and were more or less not given a real option to choose their freedoms separate from the interests of these patriarchal idealists. As Simone de Beauvoir illustrates in The Second Sex, women were forced to relinquish their claims to transcendence and authentic subjectivity by a progressively more stringent acceptance of the ―passive‖ and ―alienated‖ role to man‘s ―active‖ and ―subjective‖ demands (Norton 1266-67). ―They remained trapped inside themselves thereby perpetuating the passive role determined for them by the male‖ (Helene Cixous, Norton 1953). 21 American International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 2 No. 6; December 2016 I explore the theme of violation as liberation in Salman Rushdie‘s Midnight’s Children and Vikram Seth‘s A Suitable Boy. Midnight’s Children not favorably but rather sardonically portrays the ill-fittedness of a matriarchal society through its creation of the hypocritical character of Saleem, where as A Suitable Boy‘s stringent separation of men and women‘s roles in society espouses the importance of the patriarchal Indian society.